Financial planning is a crucial, yet complex task. There are a myriad of financial vehicles that one may chose from to fund various life "events" (e.g., the purchase of a home, or the payment of a child's college education, etc.), and perhaps just as many sources of "advice" about how one should go about doing so. One may elect to "research" the various product and service offerings to setup an appropriate plan or, as is more commonly the case, knowledgeable persons may be consulted for this purpose. Professional brokers and financial planners typically have access to much more financial information as well as a wide variety of product offerings, but such information is normally provided to the consumer verbally or in some other terse fashion that makes it very difficult for the consumer to ascertain the "value" of the information.
There have been attempts to ameliorate this situation through the use of various computer-implemented planning tools. Thus, for example, life insurance brokers have the capability of entering personal and insurance plan data into a software program, which is then used to generate a table reflecting, among other things, the "value" of a policy over the life of the customer. Similar attempts have been made to display or illustrate temporal data in the context of a customer's "lifetime," but such techniques do not have interactive capabilities so that one or more information variables can be easily manipulated to change the plan results, and they do not display the temporal information in a easy-to-read and useful format. Moreover, there is no financial planning tool currently available that provides effective display of temporal data, or the storage and manipulation of financial product descriptions for use in conjunction with such data in order to facilitate creation of a viable financial plan.